4/19/2006 @ 9:00AM

Behind The Blank Slate

What if you could pick one thing and start over from scratch? What would you change? Would you choose another career, a different home, a new spouse? Or would you choose to remake the world around you? Why not fix America’s prison system, make schools more efficient, or make your political leaders more intelligent?

That’s the question we posed to the contributors to our Blank Slate special report. We asked experts in a wide variety of fields to step back and imagine what it would be like if we didn’t have to accept the status quo, if we could reinvent things without regard for cost, politics or practicality.

We are surrounded by thingstools, technologies, ideas, institutions. They make us who we are. But sometimes these things can trap us. As our creations evolve, they adapt to changing needs, but often they retain vestigial traits, throwbacks to earlier times.

Consider the humble computer keyboard. It’s one of the most important tools in our daily lives, but the keyboard long predates the PC. Our modern keyboard designknown as QWERTY for its first row of letter keyswas designed in 1868 by printer Christopher Sholes for use on manual typewriters. Sholes needed to find a way to slow typists down and keep them from hitting the keys too fast, which could jam the machine. So he took the most commonly used letters, banished them to the edges of the keyboard and placed common letter combinations far away from each other. The result: A keyboard that was intentionally inefficient.

Years passed, and the need to slow typists down disappeared. Eventually, we started using computers, which have no practical speed limit at all. But the inefficient keyboard layout persisted, out of custom and habit. As a resultnearly 140 years after Sholes created his keyboard layoutmodern computer users are stuck with an obsolete design that not only slows us down, but also can cause crippling hand injuries.

Yet we still use it. Countless alternative keyboard designs have been proposed through the yearsAugust Dvorak’s eponymous layout is the most famousbut none have stuck. There’s just not enough momentum to switch, and any keyboard maker that manufactured a different layout would likely get burned. So it seems we’re stuck with QWERTY.

The keyboard is not the only tool that no longer makes sense. In this special report, we look at a number of topics that are begging for reinvention. We tackle prescription drug patents, sports, prisons, spying, the university system and the nature of reality. We look at ways you can reinvent yourself, ditching bad habits and changing your image. We even take a fresh look at life itself and imagine what it would be like if we could redo evolution.